Diamond outshines all other gemstones as a symbol of wealth and prestige till date, but apart from its appeal as a gemstone, it possesses a remarkable range of unique physical properties such as high thermal conductivity at room temperature, highest hardness and lowest compressibility that render it to be the subject of intense recent research interest and establish it as the best solid state material. It is considered as an ideal material for varied applications such as: cutting tools, coating magnetic disks, optical switches, electronic devices, spintronic devices and quantum computation. Diamond has tremendous potential but the cost of its production using current technologies is high, thus, significantly limiting the development of products incorporating diamond.
Extensive research is being carried out worldwide on the various aspects of diamond formation. The initial process used for diamond synthesis was inspired by the natural diamond formation that takes place under High Temperature and High Pressure (HPHT) but it resulted in single crystal diamond that was inefficient for many applications. The current technology that is being used for diamond production employs a costly infrastructure and the expenditure incurred is high thus, significantly limiting the development of products incorporating diamond. Currently, CVD is the most exploited technology for diamond synthesis yet its commercialization is still in its beginnings. Researchers and Engineers are currently concentrating upon developing a method to scale up the CVD process.
Since the discovery of fullerenes, researchers have been fascinated by these spherical carbon molecules that have a bonding intermediate of graphite (sp2) and diamond (sp3). Fullerenes have been used as catalyst to deposit diamond films on various substrates and it was observed that a thin layer of fullerene increased diamond formation by about 10 orders of magnitude. U.S. Pat. No. 5,209,916 discloses a process of obtaining synthetic diamond film on a diamond or fullerene coated substrate by impinging a beam of accelerated fullerene ions on it. It has also been described the process of transformation of fullerenes to diamond by collisional fragmentation of fullerene in argon microwave plasma, but the process was elaborate and energy consuming as it required the fragmentation of fullerene molecules to fullerene ions and subsequently accelerating the ions to bombard the substrate. It has further been reported the use of fullerene C60 as co-catalyst for HPHT synthesis of diamonds. Inspite the development of processes for diamond synthesis employing fullerene, there exists a need for a method that can cover large surfaces cheaply and completely and reduce the production cost to a point at which it becomes economically viable to use diamond as a material of choice.